The detailed version of what Upthere is doing is technical even by Verge standards. Suffice to say the company says it has built a new way of saving, storing, and organizing files, and done it in a way that takes advantage of the cloud. It pays special attention to metadata, enabling faster searches. "There was no one who did what we envisioned," Serlet said in an interview with The Verge. "So we started from scratch."